The Bridge

"You don’t have to do it," Scooby says.

The sun blazes behind him, and his fine blond hair is like a halo around his head; Pete can almost believe that Scooby is a saint from some religious painting, sent to talk him out of this madness. They’re only a foot or so apart, but they could be on opposite sides of the world. Scooby is on the other side of the railings, the side that’s twenty feet wide and has disused rail tracks to stand on, and railings to keep you safely on the bridge.

Pete says, "Of course I’ve got to do it." He motions with his head to the far end of the bridge, across the valley, where the rest of the gang are lounging. He can’t see from here, but guesses that the Two Johns will be smoking by now. They’ll all be waiting for him to do his stuff. "Everybody’s waiting."

Scooby glances along the tracks. "Forget them," he says. "Who cares what they think?"

Me, Pete thinks. I do. That’s the only reason I’m in this gang, with the cool kids. Because I’m crazy enough to do stunts like this.

Instead he says, "I want to do it for myself. To prove to myself, you know?"

Scooby scowls at him. "It can’t be done," he says. "I mean…look at it."

Pete swallows hard, and looks to his right. The viaduct angles away from where he’s standing, maybe eight hundred feet long, two hundred feet above the valley floor at its highest point. The black iron of the railings recedes into dizzying perspective.

Where he stands now – on the outside of the railing – is safe enough. He’s less than six feet above the side of the valley, but when he looks down, the valley side slips away precipitously. Twenty feet to his right, the tops of trees are level with his ankles. He is standing on a ledge about six inches wide. But this is not what is impossible about the dare.

Another few feet below this ledge is another ledge, an ornamental artifact designed by the bridge’s architect and noticed by few but him and the workmen who built it over a hundred years ago. This lower ledge is probably a foot and a half wide, easily wide enough for Pete stand on comfortably.

"It’ll be easy," he says and aims a grin he doesn’t feel at Scooby. The other boy is pale; he looks a lot younger than his twelve years.

"Come on," Scooby says. "Let’s just tell them that I’m having an asthma attack or something, and I’ve got to get home."

And Pete the Daredevil almost nods and climbs over the railing, back onto the solid surface of the viaduct, with its rotting sleepers and coarse yellow grass. Sanity is that close, that easy to grasp.

But he can’t do it. He is Pete the Daredevil after all. A god to kids like Scooby and even some of the bigger kids in the third year. He’s fearless, invincible. So he says, "It’s easy. I’ll see you on the other side."

Slowly, he eases himself down onto the lower ledge.

See: easy.

This lower ledge feels wide enough to dance on, and the upper ledge is about level with the top of his head, giving him a convenient handhold, though he’d be happier if he didn’t have to reach up for it, because that’ll make his arms tire more quickly. He glances to his left briefly, taking in the scent of pine from the trees, and the warm, floral smell from behind them. He listens to the languid buzz of insects, and the distant drone of a plane, higher even than the bridge. The sun is almost directly over head, and though this side of the bridge has fallen into shadow, the bricks are still warm.

Okay Pete, my boy. Let’s do this thing.

He begins to creep along the ledge. It really is quite easy. He moves his right foot and his right hand out together, then drags his left foot and hand along to his body. There’s nothing to it. Eight hundred feet is a long way, but if he were six inches above the ground, he’d be able to sprint along here.

As he shuffles along, the wind rises behind him. The sweat under his t-shirt is chill and he sees goosebumps on his bare, tanned arms. He continues to shuffle along, looking directly at the coarse bricks in front of his face, avoiding looking down or to the sides. A small spider scuttles across his field of vision, and levers itself into a crack in the mortar between bricks. Every now and again, he passes long trails of guano, baked hard by the sun.

But he’s dismayed at how tired his arms are becoming. He stops his rhythmic shuffling and rests for a moment. He wants to take his hands from the ledge above and hang them by his sides, so that some blood will drain back into them. The muscles of his shoulders are beginning to ache and jump sporadically. His biceps feel as if they may start shaking at any time. He takes a few slow deep breaths. He doesn’t know how far he’s come, but it must be a good part of the total distance.

"Come on," he hisses to himself, but his words have masked another sound from above, another voice, shouting.

He looks up. Immediately, he wishes he hadn’t.

The bricks angle up slyly, vertiginously skewed. The angles are all wrong – there seem to be no right-angles at all. And suddenly the wind is stronger, testing his adherence to the side of the bridge. He feels the world, unseen, balloon behind him, expand to fill the universe.

"I’m fine," he croaks, and drags his gaze down, away from those wrong bricks and their illusions of perspective. But his eyes move too quickly, and suddenly he is looking down. He sees the ground below zooming away, as if through the wrong end of a telescope. There is a tiny ribbon of river down there, cast across the green fabric of the ground. There are minute dots of bushes, like lint upon a blanket. They seem to rush up at him, accelerating, before falling away even faster.

He drags his gaze back up, a physical act of will, and looks back along the ledge, the way he’d crept. From the distance, he guesses he is almost at the middle of the bridge.

He feels like peeing, and doesn’t know if he may have already done so or not. The bird droppings on the bricks are suddenly in stark, high-definition relief; he sees how the patch of guano directly in front of him has assumed the shape of Africa. This strikes him as absurdly funny – that a bird maybe so skilled in the art of defecating as to be able to sculpt its emissions into maps of the continents – and he has the almost overwhelming urge to laugh out loud. He feels that if he does so, he may continue laughing until he falls from the bridge.

The spider in the crevasse between the bricks emerges, and regards him silently; Pete’s senses have suddenly become so sharpened that he can see the tiny black eyes of the creature, which are strung around its head like a tiara. After a moment, it unfolds its legs from the crack, like a hand flexing, and scuttles vertically up the side of the bridge. Pete dare not follow its progress with his eyes.

Come on, he tells himself silently. You can do it. One foot at a time, that’s all. One foot at a time.

He extends his right foot along the ledge, then his right hand. Sweat rolls down his bicep into his armpit. He drags his left foot along the ledge, and his left hand. His whole body, he realises, is trembling. Even more unexpected are the tears that are running down his face.

One. Foot. At. A. Time.

He extends his right foot again, and suddenly it is in the air, the cold, rushing air, which smells no longer of pine, but of Pete’s acrid sweat. His balance is rushing away from him, his centre of gravity away to his right. He cries out and pulls himself toward the wall of the bridge, crunching his face into the bricks, bringing blood to his nose and mouth. He dares to glance down at his foot, and sees it dangling in the air above the ribbon of river.

The ledge is gone.

It has crumbled and fallen, God alone knows when, and now there is nothing but space and the mindless buzzing of insects. In that glance, Pete sees not only the twenty-foot span of the missing ledge, but also an image of himself, falling backwards into the cold air, arms pinwheeling.

There is shouting somewhere above him, but Pete pays it no heed. Instead, he pulls himself closer to the bridge, feels its rough caress upon his skin, and in his mind becomes a part of it.

PAUL FAIRBAIRN

The Bridge